Fascinating Fascism

[rich]

"The color is black, the material is leather, the seduction is beauty,
the justification is honesty, the aim is ecstasy, the fantasy is
death."

not a bad summary of GR in one sentence, eh? wonder if SS ever read the book

rich

On Thu, Nov 4, 2010 at 3:05 PM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Want, have time, to say more, rich?
>
>
> ----- Original Message ----
> From: rich <richard.romeo at gmail.com>
> To: "“pynchon-l at waste.org“" <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> Sent: Thu, November 4, 2010 1:22:21 PM
> Subject: Fascinating Fascism
>
> essay by Susan Sontag on Leni Riefenstahl (1975)
>
> http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1975/feb/06/fascinating-fascism/
>
> lots of Pynchonian echoes
>
>
> These ideals are vivid and moving to many people, and it is
> dishonest—and tautological—to say that one is affected by Triumph of
> the Will and Olympiad because they were made by a film maker of
> genius. Riefenstahl’s films are still effective because, among other
> reasons, their longings are still felt, because their content is a
> romantic ideal to which many continue to be attached, and which is
> expressed in such diverse modes of cultural dissidence and propaganda
> for new forms of community as the youth/rock culture, primal therapy,
> Laing’s antipsychiatry, Third World camp-following, and belief in
> gurus and the occult. The exaltation of community does not preclude
> the search for absolute leadership; on the contrary, it may inevitably
> lead to it. (Not surprisingly, a fair number of the young people now
> prostrating themselves before gurus and submitting to the most
> grotesquely autocratic discipline are former anti-authoritarians and
> anti-elitists of the 1960s.) And Riefenstahl’s devotion to the Nuba, a
> tribe not ruled by one supreme chief or shaman, does not mean she has
> lost her eye for the seducer-performer—even if she has to settle for a
> nonpolitician. Since she finished her work on the Nuba some years ago,
> one of her main projects has been photographing Mick Jagger.
>
> rich
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